The Face Thief (5 page)

“Thank you,” Potash said hoarsely.

“Because your girl,” said Bortz, “is good.”

On the trip home, traffic had abated and he drove on the interstate in a trance, making tiny yanks of the wheel to the right and the left while the landscape gave the impression of being slowly hauled by on either side. After an hour and a half, he left the highway and entered the gently curving roads of his development. Presently, his house appeared around a bend with its calm, tidy proportions, its deep green lawn and beckoning eyelike eaves. It seemed to him just then to be glowing with dumb innocence, like a middle-aged matron receiving guests while being betrayed by her husband in the back room.

He parked and almost immediately saw his wife coming out of the house holding the cordless phone in one hand. Anabella was radiant, her lean body seeming to rise up, up, up, and for a brief, wild second, seeing her there haloed with salvational light, he was certain that she had Janelle Styles on the line and that it had all been a terrible misunderstanding. He was still lurching after this thought when to his dismay he watched her mouth the words
your mother
and extend the phone in his direction.

Of all the words he wanted to hear at this moment, those two ranked near the very bottom. But since his father’s death a year earlier, he’d found it simply impossible not to take his mother’s calls.

He faked a quick smile at his wife, who still knew nothing about their imminent financial collapse, got out of the car and with a grazing kiss on her lips, retrieved the handset.

“John?”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Happy anniversary.” Her tone was deadpan.

“It’s not for another month,” he said.

“I was being proactive.”

“How’d you even know?” He was astonished.

“Your wife, Little Miss Sunshine, told me. But isn’t every day an anniversary out at Camp Cosmic?”

Sarcasm was one of her main weapons. Her belief was that his town was a hippy-dippy Aquarian paradise filled with complacent millionaires, and that she and she alone knew the harsh truth of how the world was made. He loved her, and yet felt very happy to be half a world away from her.

“Ha-ha,” he said miserably.

“So how’s life?”

Her timing was uncanny. His whole life she had called at weak moments, stumblings, setbacks of all kinds.

“Just dandy,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“What’s up, Mom?”

“What, a mother can’t ask her son a simple question?”

He said nothing for a moment.

“Listen,” she said, “and for at least the third time. Your father’s stone is being unveiled next week, and it’s important that you be here.”

“Of course I’ll be there. We already spoke about it.”

“It’s very important,” she said, ignoring his utterance.

He could hear her voice thickening.

“I mean it’s the least we can do,” she said, her voice thickening further.

“Mom,” he said.

“It’s a beautiful stone,” she said, now in full flow. Potash was used to these tacks and spins of feeling. She lived in an ongoing mood best described as the Stentorian Memorial, in which people she’d ignored while alive became in death touchstones of deep grief.

“I’m sure,” he said.

“But don’t worry about me!” she burst out.

“Mom,” he said again.

His mother was overweight, and the stertor of her breath on the phone as she breathed in and out for a few seconds was like a piece of paper being repeatedly crumpled in his ear.

“Even a little bit,” she whispered, and then hung up.

Chapter Ten

A
t age sixteen, she met Randy Patterson. He had flaming sideburns, tight jeans, and a small, beautiful head. From the start, she found it impossible not to be amazed by the way the air around her body fitted into the air around his. Everyone noticed. It was what “natural” meant. They were natural together. They went to concerts and made out backstage. They walked on the Atlantic City boardwalk and watched waves arrive from all over the world. With their arms around each other, they felt docked, like spaceships. Even better, they understood each other’s smallest mannerisms. He could cock an eyebrow and signal an avalanche of judgment about to fall, or tilt his head a mere ironic inch and it would be as if he was whispering his thoughts directly into her ear. He worked as a line cook at a Denny’s and played bass in a band called Gridlock.

One afternoon several months after they’d officially begun going steady, Randy was especially excited because, he explained, he had a “big fat stonking secret” that he was gonna show her later that day.

That same evening, at dusk, they were parked and making out in his Pontiac Firebird Trans Am when he grabbed her by the shoulders.

“You ready?” he asked.

“Guess so.”

With a nod, he started the car and drove the two of them to a Walgreens and then around back. The powerful engine idled like someone tapping an empty can with a hammer. He turned off the car.

“Here we go,” he said, and got out of the car with a wink.

Out the window, she watched Randy foraging in the Dumpster. He pulled something up, looked quickly around, stuffed it under his peacoat, and then got back in the car.

“What’s that?” she asked.

Slowly, like someone pulling back a magic curtain, he revealed an assortment of pill bottles in a plastic bag.

“Are you sick?” she asked, thrilled.

He gave his special wide-eyed look, threw back his head and howled like a coyote. “Hell, yeah,” he cried, “but not in the way you’re thinking! I got a friend who works as a janitor there. We got it all worked out. He’s into pharmaceuticals, and he tosses the stuff out with the trash and then I swing by and vwalah, baby. What we don’t use, we sell.”

“Wow.”

Back home, she had recently discovered something in a drawer of her father’s dresser. It was a note from a girl. It was on pink stationery. It said, “You’re just the dearest man I’ve ever met, and no one makes me laugh harder.” It was the kind of handwriting in which all the letters looked like they were swollen with gas. She said nothing at the time. She didn’t even think much of it. But two nights later, in her diary, she solemnly wrote, “I’ve come to the conclusion that in life, virginity is silly, and in love, blow jobs are not enough.” The next day, she stole a leopard thong from J.J. Newberry.

She wanted to fuck him. It didn’t have to be in one of the perfect large beachside homes of the soap opera stars whose antics her mother now watched constantly while lying in bed. It didn’t have to be in the many-roomed, ivy-covered mansions of her books. It could as easily be in his Trans Am parked along the beach. There was a cove near Race Point where you felt lifted right out of the world. She wanted to go to the quiet closet of that cove. She wanted to give him her body. When he played in his band, she used to watch his hands as they ranged along the frets and imagine his nakedness somehow as an extension of the sounds he made onstage.

“Take this,” he said, holding a pill up.

“What’ll it do?” She wasn’t frightened, only curious.

“Nothing, really. It’ll just make you feel free.”

She smiled at him.

“Sure,” she said.

An hour later she was sitting in the car at the beach thinking how the waves were like hands as they individually unfisted against the sand and how peaceful it would be to go to the bottom of the ocean and just lie there being massaged by those long green fingers. She was thinking that the secret of the universe was that everything lived apart from everything else but was connected by the bright, living fluid of eyesight. And in eyesight there were no failures or winters or famines. Instead, everything was perfect and extended forever in all directions like daylight. His face of a beautiful living creature was drawing very close. His eyes were glistening with tears. Her own eyes were filling too, even as she felt her body suddenly leave her bones, fly through the air and gather in a far-off tree, where it sat there looking peacefully out at the world, like a cat.

They went steady for a year, during which time they began having sex. It was uncomfortable at first, and she was faintly disappointed. But it seemed to mean so much to him. When they eventually drifted apart, she told herself that she was no longer a girl but a woman in possession of a new illumination: that sex had a way of allowing men to believe they were permanently in control. But that once you got it over with, the far more important business of life lay waiting, and because they were distracted by their recent performance, men could easily—like large machines pivoting smoothly on ball bearings—be rotated at will.

Six months before college, with mementos of Randy now moved to the back of the closet in the slow sideways crawl of objects through her room and into storage in boxes and on high shelves, she took a solemn vow of sex. Immediately afterward, with a completely impassive look on her face, she began fucking as many boys as possible. She fucked them in cars. She fucked them in the living rooms of their parents’ houses. With cramps in her legs, she fucked them standing up in the supply closets of school. She told herself she was storing up important experience. She told herself she was experimenting her way toward what would eventually be mastery.

She felt nothing, nothing at all. She was utterly numb. One evening around this time, she took a knife and cut herself slowly and repeatedly on the arm and it was like opening a window in the house and letting the bad air out of her own body.

Then she matriculated at Smith College, which resembled a British country mansion with its pavilions and lawns and winding flagstone paths. She took a full roster of English courses and dated sporadically and with no particular satisfaction among the widest, deepest talent pool of boys she’d ever seen. She had two lesbian flings, but her interest quickly flagged. Though she had a private off-campus room and kept mostly to herself, she sometimes spent time with a group of black-clad girls who read everything and knew everyone and found common cause in pronouncing themselves bored to tears.

At the end of her second year, her mother died. The funeral was held on a warm spring day. The smell of the grass was suffocating. The gravesite was flanked on every side by mild elevations. These gave the impression that one slid downhill into waiting death. A scattering of relatives had flown in from all over the country. Minister Cartwright led the service, and then her father, swaying erratically, read a eulogy describing the “sacred compact and Christian joy” of marriage. Margot said nothing at the funeral. She solemnly accepted the condolences of relatives and filled their glasses at the reception held in their living room. Tears tracked down her cheeks, and she watched them fall. Experimentally, she tried to imagine that she would never see her mother again in life but couldn’t conceive of it. Then that night, back in college, she did two lines of powerful coke and blew her bearded English professor, a man by the name of Neil Walsh who knew more about certain poems of Walt Whitman than any man alive.

At the beginning of her third year in college, her major was still undeclared. But in early September the phone rang in her room. Her father was on the other end and told her that he’d been fired from his job in the public defender’s office. Stephen McMahon the city ombudsman was a low-life gutter-crawling Judas who would rue the day he’d brought down the last honest man in Massachusetts. He’d worked his heart out for the people and now the people, in the person of this vile cur, had killed him dead. It’s a good thing your dear mother isn’t around to see this.

She heard the ice cubes tinkling in his glass as he began to cry. When he recovered his composure and blew his nose, he told her how sorry he was about what this meant for her.

When she asked what
did
this mean for her, he told her he’d been effectively blackballed, and how the hell did she think a fifty-six-year-old out-of-work lawyer would find a job? The best thing, he added, would be for her to take a loan out for the coming semester.

She wasn’t certain she’d heard him right and asked for clarification.

“Honey,” he said, “we’re broke.”

The next day, she made an appointment with her guidance counselor and over his objections changed her concentration to a split literature/business focus, signing up for courses in marketing, accounting and finance. In the meantime, to console herself, she decided to blame her father for everything.

Chapter Eleven

H
e’d accepted her dinner invitation. Why had he accepted? His life was replete. He loved his wife. Why was he sitting at this restaurant dressed in his worsted wool suit, while enjoying the pressure in the air of her glance on his face; her lit, roving, happy glance?

“You were saying?” she was asking. Her face glowed under the subtle mask of its makeup.

He took a bead on himself. All the internal pressure seals were holding just fine. “I was saying,” he said, “that the way I got into it was through studying psychology, at first, because, it simply seemed the kind of thing you were supposed to study if you wanted to know the way the mind worked.”

“Right,” she said, “but what led you to
that,
I’m asking?”

“I was just a curious kid, I guess.”

“Well, that doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

Their food was served. He tried, again, to quell his potentially bolting nerves. He was simply out of practice. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been alone with a woman in an extended social situation, sanctioned by his wife—even if his wife hadn’t understood exactly what he was doing, and had airily said, as he was leaving, “Have fun, darling.”

“But there’s something so boring about psychology,” he started to say when she interrupted him.

“Don’t talk,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because I want to watch you eat.”

“Beg your pardon?” A mottled blush, beginning at the breastbone, was spreading outward over his chest.

“Think of it as revenge for you calling me up onstage that day. Besides, I’m taking you out tonight so I can do what I want.”

“Can you now,” he said in a low voice.

But instead of answering him, she merely kept chewing while studying his face for a long moment.

“You have a sensual upper lip,” she said, “but a real pleasure-denying lower one. And you have, Mr. Billings, a pronounced filtrum.”

The filtrum, or groove between the base of the nose and lips, was one of the classic tells of sexual desire—as she well knew. He stared at her while a wave of confused heat roiled through his head even as, outwardly, he gave no sign of his discomfiture in the least and continued to cut his meat with small composed sawing motions.

“Are you flirting with me?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said, and laughed an open laugh, one of the most open laughs he’d ever heard from this tactically brilliant girl, “but if I decide to, I’ll let you know.”

She had a beautiful head of newly cut and dyed short blond hair, which was parted on one side like a boy, and put into fresh relief the deep, symmetrical sensuality of her features. From these, in regular bursts, fusillades of saucy mischievous looks were flying in his direction.

“Let’s return,” he said, clearing his throat lengthily, “to your previous question about how I got my start. I’m not sure if there was a single event, but when I think back on it, I can remember that my parents knew this couple who they would have over every once in a while for dinner. I might have been only a kid at the time, but I could still see plain as day that the wife hated the weakness of the husband, and that the husband was grossed out by the loudness of the wife, and that below the polite party chatter there was this sound track of dark, muffled sounds the two of them made at each other, which was the way they really felt. I could see it, and I could hear it too, those sounds, like dying animals make, beneath the polite conversation. The thing was, I thought everyone else did too. I thought everyone heard the secret sound track. I thought that everyone saw how people form a little mask to protect themselves, and a little story in which they’re the hero, and how the mask rides the story like a horse into the sunset of their own minds.”

He realized that in his concentrated effort at recall, he had been addressing what face readers called the lateral catch, that is, that space right below her right eye. He raised his eyes to hers.

“On the other hand,” he said, “no one is a devil if you listen to them for long enough.”

Her finger was lazily circling the rim of her wineglass.

“Then what?” she asked.

“How do you mean?”

“How did you get from there”—she stabbed a long polished fingernail onto the linen tablecloth and drew it toward her with the rising rasp of a zipper opening—“to here?”

The science of touch is called haptics. He’d always been particularly sensitive to touch, even a touch that was entirely implied like the one he’d just witnessed of her finger on the tablecloth. He could feel something, an aroused signal moving through yards of sluggish abdominal flesh.

“Practice,” he said with a wink, and before she could even respond, he added, abruptly, “Follow my elbow, please.”

“What?”

He relished her confusion as he reached up to deliberately scratch his nose.

“My elbow,” he said. “Are you following where it’s pointing?

“Yes.”

“Do you see that woman?”

“In the blue pantsuit, whose back is toward us?”

“Yes. We passed directly in front of her while walking in and we even crossed glances with her, the two of us.”

“I remember, yes.”

“Read her, please.”

She made a laughing, outraged sound of disbelief, but when she saw he was serious, she grew serious as well. She shut her eyes, spread her hands on the table, and tilted her head, concentrating hard, her brow wrinkling with the effort.

“Wavy hairline,” she said, her eyes fluttering slightly, “with some particular disturbance at about age fourteen, thin lower and slightly thicker upper lips, and the . . . the moneybag pouches, the extra plump spaces on the lower cheeks around the mouth.” She raised her eyes to his, triumphant. “Reserves of energy,” she said. “The gal is probably tireless.”

“Check.” He enjoyed slipping back into the lightly sexualized choreography of instruction. “And what else?”

“Oooh, you’re evil. Okay.” Again she shut her eyes and lowered her head, slightly, so that he could see the way the part in her hair wound in a French curve around the top of her skull.

“I’m picking up,” she said, “a cleft chin. Which would mean a substantial ego, and likes to perform.”

“Ah, very good,” he was genuinely satisfied. “And?”

“The ears,” she said, after a moment, “are large and are riding low on the head. That would make her a thoughtful and deliberate type, most likely. Oh, and another thing, the glabellar fold between the eyes. She has a deep, deep crease there—some blocks of a sort maybe in the male side of her personality.”

“I’m impressed,” he said softly. “You do good work.”

She looked up at him, smiling brilliantly.

“I’m only as good as my teacher,” she said.

She reached her hand across the table and touched the top of his own hand. Nearly instantly, his ears began to burn.

“Thank you,” he said calmly, not giving away a thing.